Leonardo da Vinci — "Weight, force, and percussion, with their respective causes, are all that is kno…"
Weight, force, and percussion, with their respective causes, are all that is known of the movements of bodies.
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Understanding this quote
What it means
Motion and physical change in the world reduce to three measurable causes: weight (gravity's pull), force (applied push or tension), and percussion (impact and collision). Everything we can reliably know about how objects move comes down to these quantifiable interactions — a call for grounding natural philosophy in observable, mechanical principles rather than metaphysical speculation.
Relevance to Leonardo da Vinci
Da Vinci obsessively studied mechanics in his notebooks, designing machines, analyzing bird flight, and sketching hydraulic systems. As an engineer and artist needing to understand how cranes lift, projectiles fly, and muscles move limbs, reducing motion to weight, force, and percussion was practical doctrine. He dissected bodies and tested devices precisely because mechanics governed his craft.
The era
In Renaissance Europe, Aristotelian natural philosophy still dominated — motion explained through essences and teleology, not mathematics. Da Vinci wrote this amid a gradual shift toward empirical mechanics that would later crystallize in Galileo and Newton. Without calculus or formalized physics, isolating weight, force, and percussion as foundational was a remarkably forward-looking, proto-scientific stance.
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